The Plague of Climate Denial Confronts an Actual Plague

Just to get your weekend off to a happy start, there seems to be an outbreak of the hantavirus in Yosemite, and folks aren't entirely sure that it will stay there, or that it will be the only little biological horror to visit these shores. For the purposes of the blog, though, I was intrigued by two elements of the accounts that are, sadly, related. First, there is the fact that a lot of this really nasty stuff has to do with The Great Climate Change Hoax....

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Extreme weather patterns have played a big role in the two recent outbreaks, and health officials worry more such events could be on the horizon because of climate change. Climate cycles very clearly play a part in outbreaks, says Michael Osterholm,director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policyat the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The question is at what point any given outbreak is being caused by climate change or simply normal weather cycles. However, it's clear that "eventually (climate change) will affect things, but is it now? We don't know," he says.

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And then there's...

At the same time, health officials fret that the public health infrastructure of laboratories and public health workers that tracks and responds to outbreaks is being cut. That could make outbreaks harder to detect and control. "The federal spigot is not just being cut off, it's being smashed," Osterholm says. "We've got a crash coming. We can see it."

Of course, there is only one political party in this country that has in positions of leadership people who don't think global climate change is actually happening. Of course, there is only one political party in this country that has as its vice-presidential candidate a man who proposed a budget that possibly will cut the budget for the National Institutes of Health by 19 percent in two years. We are walking into a great trap here. We are not ready for a serious national response to the problem of climate change while, at the same time, we are nowhere near ready to provide a national response to its most predictable consequences. Maybe we should let the states develop their own individual plans to deal with plagues. They are, after all, the laboratories of democracy.